Chapter 39: The Strongest
Forty five….forty six….
I pulled my body up on the tree branch, held it for five breaths, and then lowered myself. The cold air burned in my chest on the descent. My shoulders were telling me things I was choosing not to prioritize.
I had been watching Hao exercise in this manner for awhile now and I studied the way he walked across a room, the way he carried timber or turned a tool. He made it look easy because it was, for him, easy due to the fact that he had honed his body through rigorous training.
I pulled my body up, held it for six breaths, and then lowered myself back down.
I need to do this every morning.
I finished the set and dropped from the branch, landing lightly onto my feet and shaking out my arms.
The dagger work came after.
I had settled into a sequence over the past week: conditioning first to warm the body, then field work to open the channels, then drills to close the gap between the two. The sequence mattered because the body could not do precise qi work while the muscles were cold any more than a forge could produce fine metalwork before it reached temperature.
Left to right. The horizontal cuts, elbow and shoulder. The qi moving through the arm channels as the blade moved. That was the critical correction from the week before.